A Proposed Open Infrastructure for Construction Project Document Sharing

The paper gives a comprehensive overview of the European Esprit Condor project. The project provides a migration path from document-based to model-based approaches to information representation and structuring. The paper, first, presents the approach that is adopted to describe the business processes and document management practices of the project end-users, and also to capture the requirements of the Condor system. The chosen approach made use of the IDEF0 and UML (Unified Modelling Language) methodologies. A Strategy towards the integration of the Electronic Document Management (EDM) systems used within the project is then given. The paper also includes a comprehensive description of the overall modelling infrastructure that supports the proposed system. Finally, a description of the prototype V1, that implements the inter-working services between heterogeneous EDM solutions, is given. The project is ongoing and supported by a user interest group, which involves representatives from a variety of non-construction industry companies all over Europe.